Recognizing separate hard drive

[pineapplepaul]

So I managed to install and boot into 10.4.3 (8F1111) successfully. Now I want to actually use it. I installed it onto a partition with the disk that has Windows. All my music and movies are on a separate hard disk. How do I access the files that are on that other disk? Let me know if you need more information that...

[jbjonas]

if you open Disk Utility, do you see the other drive? If so, double click it, and OS X should mount it and show it on your desktop(as read-only). If not, please tell us more about your setup. especially, what types of drives are they- SATA, PATA?

[pineapplepaul]

Disk Utility sees it, but it does not mount when I double click it. Both HD's are PATA.

[jbjonas]

How familiar are you with the terminal? you can mount it manually there... first, go to System Profiler, click on ATA on the left, and then copy and paste what it says for the bus (or buses) that contain your IDE drives. Mine looks like this (for example)

ATA Bus:

 

WDC WD1200JB-00CRA1:

 

Capacity: 111.79 GB

Model: WDC WD1200JB-00CRA1

Revision: 17.07W17

Serial Number: WD-WCA8C3951103

Removable Media: No

Detachable Drive: No

BSD Name: disk0

Protocol: ATA

Unit Number: 0

Socket Type: Internal

OS9 Drivers: No

S.M.A.R.T. status: Not Supported

Volumes:

Storage:

Capacity: 111.79 GB

Available: 85.45 GB

Writable: No

File System: NTFS

BSD Name: disk0s1

Mount Point: /Volumes/Storage

 

WDC WD600BB-00CAA1:

 

Capacity: 55.9 GB

Model: WDC WD600BB-00CAA1

Revision: 17.07W17

Serial Number: WD-WMA8E6956916

Removable Media: No

Detachable Drive: No

BSD Name: disk1

Protocol: ATA

Unit Number: 1

Socket Type: Internal

OS9 Drivers: No

S.M.A.R.T. status: Not Supported

Volumes:

OSx86:

Capacity: 55.9 GB

Available: 41.79 GB

Writable: Yes

File System: Journaled HFS+

BSD Name: disk1s1

Mount Point: /

 

[pineapplepaul]

Well here's all that it says under that drive:

 

ST380013A:

 

Capacity: 74.53 GB

Model: ST380013A

Revision: 8.01

Serial Number: 5JVBE7NX

Removable Media: No

Detachable Drive: No

BSD Name: disk1

Protocol: ATA

Unit Number: 1

Socket Type: Internal

OS9 Drivers: No

S.M.A.R.T. status: Not Supported

 

 

I tried just pasting that into Terminal, but nothing was happening. What should I do next?

[jbjonas]

sorry, I didn't mean to tell you to paste that into terminal. It looks like it's not seeing the partition there. Hmmm.

go into terminal and type the following:

cd /dev
ls d*

copy and paste what you see into this forum

[pineapplepaul]

It says:

 

disk0   disk0s1 disk0s2 disk1   disk1s1

 

Sorry for the late reply, I've been out of town the past couple days.

[jbjonas]

No prob, we can't all spend our whole lives on this site

Ok, so you've got

disk0   disk0s1 disk0s2 disk1   disk1s1

To interpret this, disk0 is the first logical drive OS X sees. it has 2 partitions, disk0s1 and disk0s2, the 1st and 2nd partitions in that order (obviously). I'm guessing you have XP as disk0s1, and the OS X install as disk0s2. You can verify this by looking in Disk Utility: Under your OSX drive, it should say disk0s2 for BSD Name. That means that the disk you want to access, is the separate drive- disk1. The following is assuming you formatted that drive as XP's default format- NTFS. Open the terminal and enter these commands:

sudo su

(enter your root password when prompted)

mkdir /Volumes/Storage

(you can substitute any name you want instead of Storage)

mount_ntfs /dev/disk1s1 /Volumes/Storage

(obviously changing Storage to the name you chose above)

Now you can quit terminal, go to Finder, Go>Go To Folder...> and type /Volumes/Storage

once you click Go, it will show that folder, and it will also show up on the desktop.

 

Similarly, you can mount the XP partition as well, changing disk1s1 to disk0s1. Anything you mount in this fashion will be READ-ONLY. This is because OS X only supports NTFS drives as read-only. If you need to write to files in both XP and OS X, you may want to convert your second drive to a FAT32 partition. But there can be problems with that (losing data in the convert process, and FAT32 does not handle large (several GB) files very well.)

[pineapplepaul]

That worked beautifully! Thanks for all your help with this.

[jbjonas]

No problem If you use that drive all the time, there are other ways to make those commands run automatically every time you boot into OS X. Just open terminal, use the 'sudo su' command to get root priveledges, go to the folder 'Private/etc' and create a new file called "rc.local". Any commands you put in that file will be automatically run at startup.

[pineapplepaul]

No problem If you use that drive all the time, there are other ways to make those commands run automatically every time you boot into OS X. Just open terminal, use the 'sudo su' command to get root priveledges, go to the folder 'Private/etc' and create a new file called "rc.local". Any commands you put in that file will be automatically run at startup.

 

OK, since I'm a total noob to all of this, how exactly would I do that?

[jbjonas]

Open text edit. Add these lines (or ones that match your setup- change the drive names, or add more lines for another drive you want to mount)

mkdir /Volumes/Storage
mount_ntfs /dev/disk1s1 /Volumes/Storage

 

These are the commands you want to run at startup. Now save this file to your desktop as "rc.local" Quit textedit.

On the Desktop, find the file 'rc.local.rtf' Click on it once, wait a sec, and click again to change the name. remove the .rtf, so it is "rc.local" tell the window that pops up that you want to keep .local.

Now, in Finder, go to the menu Go>Go To Folder> type in "/Private/etc" and click Go.

All you need to do is drag the rc.local file you created from the desktop into that folder. When you get the warning window, click Authenticate, and type in your root password. That's it!

[pineapplepaul]

Strange. I followed those instructions exactly, but it didn't mount the drive on startup. I even tried it a second time, but to no avail.

[jbjonas]

Hmmm... maybe someone else can tell us why that didn't work. I'm lost. And I still don't understand why you can't mount them in Disk Utility by clicking on the partition, and then the blue mount button at the top... weird

[pineapplepaul]

The really weird thing is that when in Windows, I was looking at the drives in Partition Magic. PM had that drive listed as a "Dynamic Disk", but windows explorer said it was NTFS. Then when I looked at it in Disk Utility it calls it "Windows_LDM".

 

I figured it would help if I tried to convert the partition to straight up NTFS using PM, but it wouldn't do it, and I'm not sure how to in Windows without corrupting the data.

[jbjonas]

I never understood the advantage of Windows Dynamic Disks... If you look at this microsoft page it will tell you about how to convert them. Only, I don't think there is a way to turn a Dynamic Disk into a Basic NTFS disk without losing all the data on it.

Be very careful if you attempt any file system conversions... its easy to lose data. Plus, if your OS X can recognize and read the drives while they are dynamic disks, I doubt that making them basic NTFS, will help with automounting them in OS X.

A lot of us have had similar issues with the way OS X treats NTFS partitions. I myself have yet to find a permanent solution to my problems. (other than, of course, buying a real Mac Tower whenever they come out with one with an intel chip )